NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2025 (April 2-April 13)

[Chris Knipp]

PIOTR TROJAN, ANDRZEJ KONOPA IN THE ASSISTANT

WILHELM AND ANIKA SASNAL: THE ASSISTANT (2025)

Surreal life with an early 20th-century inventor

This strange, slow-moving piece set in the very early twentieth century is adapted from the well-known 1908 novel by Swiss-German author Robert Walser Der Gehülfe that is a masterpiece of calculated unease and very dry humor. But does the film capture these qualities? I'm not so sure, though it tries hard. It is the work of a Polish married couple, Wilhelm a painter and visual artist who is the cinematographer and Anka who is an editor and writer. But the film's nominal editor was Aleksandra Gowin, and she could have used a stronger hand.

The novel, described as "breathtaking" by Good Reads, follows a man called Joseph Marti (Piotr Trojan), who quits his job at a bookbinding shop after being abused for a poorly glued volume, and gets hired by an inventor whose projects are doomed. Marti doesn't at first know this, but we're made uneasy in the best early segment of the film by the suspicoiusly odd pampering he receives, fine food, freedom to smoke on the job and come and go, a flirtatious wife (Agnieszka Żulewska), while a previous assistant is just in the process of being sent packing. Debts multiply.

Is this a great job or just a very weird and crazy-making one? A lot is expected of Joseph yet his duties are never clearly defined, and he's not paid. The actor is muscular and well-built and seen a lot shirtless at first, to show he might be ready for anything, though any potential affair with the wife is held in check.

Walser, who would up penniless and forgotten and institutionalized after a mental collapse, apparently experienced the same mix of jobs as his protagonist here.

An inheritance has led "Technical Engineer Karl Tobler" to take up residence in a grand hilltop mansion, set himself up as an inventor, and create a goofy project of "advertising clocks" to be used in public places and on trams all to tell the exact time. But when a potential investor comes and Marti has to greet him since Walser is away, the sample clocks are all set at different, wrong times, and the investor leaves laughing. Good Reads summarizes the novel: "Joseph is at once pleased and terribly worried, a state soon followed by even stickier psychological complexities. He enjoys the beautiful view over Lake Zurich, in the company of the proud wife, Frau Tobler, and the delicious savory meals. But does he deserve any of these pleasures?" No, and why does he get them?

There is no Pinteresque reversal of roles or Beckettian degeneration, just a gradual disorder and decline. The film does capture the surrealism of the situation: and though 1908 is before 1917 when the actual surrealist movement began, the surreal spirit seems to hover around Engineer Karl Tobler's posh but off-kilter world, and incidentally there are knockoffs of School of Paris modernism hanging on the walls of Tobler's villa. This is also a story of a victim, and has vague affinities with Kafka, especially The Trial and The Castle, and indeed Kafka is said to have admired Walser.

There is a lot going on in this film. There is the economic and class element, but Marti is exploited in other ways, sometimes as a factotum or front man, often as an amenuensis, sometimes given the lead, treated like a member of the family, or a live-in butler. He doesn't know what he is or where he stands, and he sticks by Tobler in hopes the latter will succeed and thus pay him. Beside the clocks, midway Tobler begins to tinker with a can opener, which Marti, in a moment of foreseeing the two world wars when millions of soldiers woult be issued can openers, predicts this is a good idea. Tobler also makes giant ugly objects that look like bad soap sculptures. These are displayed backed up by fireworks at a big party when the central cast all gets drunk and naked, Marti and his past and present bosses and the women, and they all dance nude in a drawn-out sequence. A man who has played beautiful Bach on the keyboard now, at the party, turns to cacophonous modernistic banging. Is this the trimph of modernism, a harbinger of World War I? Or just another inexplicable digression?

Olivia Popp, in her Rotterdam CIneuropa review, says the best part of the film is its anachronisms, in some of the costumes and sets (and zooms?) but especially the use of contemporary rock music, and wishes that had been done more. But she also acknowledges the film runs on too long. It might have been better if it was tightened up and unified, and instead of rock provided with period-appropriate modernist music, like early Stravinsky. A review by Carmen Gray is also admiring of the film's "eccentric flashes of avant-garde dance and performance" for infusing "wild energy" and the mood of "risk-taking." The whole trouble is that this film, better at mood than narrative, goes haywire, then fizzles out, as uncertain of shape as its giant soap sculptures. But The Assistant's premonition of how crazy the twentieth century was going to become so very early is a haunting one.

The Assistant/Czlowiek do wszystkiego (Polish: "A Man for Everything"), 129 mins., debuted at Rotterdam Jan. 31, 2025. Included in New Directors/New Films, for which it was screened for this review. ND/NF showtimes:
Saturday, April 5
8:30pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater

Sunday, April 6
6:15pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2